The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Read online

  COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER

  Copyright © 2013, Daniel Pembrey. No part of this novel may be reproduced, lent or otherwise distributed in any form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted material in violation of authors’ rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tom Nguyen was a man made for our times, Natalie Chevalier concluded.

  There he stood next to the huge projector screen, in a dimmed function room of the Keaton hotel in downtown San Francisco.

  The room was packed with investors, or perhaps more accurately prospectors. They stood down the sides of the room. They crammed along the back wall. Outside, afternoon mist drifted up Stockton Street. But in here the air was close, expectant. A marine horn could just be heard above the hushed conversation and purring mobile devices.

  The house lights dimmed a little more. The stage light grew brighter.

  Tom Nguyen wore cream chinos and a white cotton shirt, the top two buttons undone. One side flapped open with the weight of a small black radio-mike. There was a lightness in Nguyen’s moccasined step only otherwise found among dancers. The fates had apparently smiled on this young man, and his four colleagues up on stage.

  He turned to his laptop and tapped in a password. The big screen went bright blue. He cleared his throat and began.

  “Good afternoon everyone and thank you for making time on a Friday afternoon for our investor presentation.

  “I want to talk to you today about groups, and about human connections.”

  He paused for the screen to catch up. It faded to a dark, midnight blue background, offsetting the clean font of ‘Clamor.us’ – by far the biggest sensation of the ‘Web 2.0’ era so far, Natalie Chevalier reflected. Bigger than MySpace, bigger than YouTube and prospectively even bigger than YouTube’s parent company, Google.

  Nguyen turned back to the rapt audience. An earnestness softened his features.

  “I’d like to suggest to you that all of us want to belong. That all of us want to feel connected to our fellow human beings. That this is a universal condition, shared by seven billion people on the planet.”

  And out of the dark blue came an image of the world as seen from deep space. It was slightly – almost psychedelically – out of focus, as though intended to be viewed through 3D specs. No matter, the screen quickly dissolved to a sight even more familiar: that of a Clamor.us profile page. Familiar because 350 million people across 145 countries – five percent of the world’s entire population – had now created one, and in tech savvy San Francisco, the adoption rate seemed closer to ninety five percent. If you weren’t on Clamor here, you didn’t exist.

  “I hope you don’t mind me showing them yours,” Nguyen turned to Dwayne Wisnold, winking. There was an appreciative titter in the audience. Twenty-something year old Wisnold was the Founder-CEO of Clamor.us, Inc.

  If Wisnold did mind, he didn’t show it. His profile page featured a photo in which his face was half covered by a cowboy hat several sizes too big. The photo was cropped of the two people standing either side of him, perhaps female, perhaps wearing bikinis. Spearing the bottom frame was the swizzle stick of a drink.

  His user name was ‘Wiz kid’ and he had 1,719 friends. Interests included: Making things, Psychology, Midtown Doornail, Pulling stuff apart –

  Midtown Doornail?

  Natalie stopped rocking the foot of her crossed leg. Of course! – she resolved the anagram: World Domination. She couldn’t help smile. Eighteen months of spiritual retreat hadn’t blunted her critical reasoning after all.

  “Shall we take a look at which groups Mister Wisnold is signed up to?” Tom Nguyen continued. It felt more like a gospel church moment than an Initial Public Offering presentation. Curiosity about this company and its supernaturally young CEO was insatiable. And Nguyen was shown as one of the very few with full access to Wiz’s profile page: a ‘Top Top Friend’, no less.

  The front row of bankers brayed gleefully. “Show us the money!” one couldn’t help yelling. For you could almost smell it. The first day ‘pop’ of the IPO stood to become a whole new phenomenon. Natalie recalled Google going out at $100, defying all the skeptics. “A search company worth thirty five billion?” they’d scoffed. Just a few weeks later, the stock traded at $600, the company worth two hundred billion. What would Clamor be worth?

  Nguyen navigated a sequence of screens. His long fingers played the keyboard like a piano. Fleetingly, an image pressed into Natalie’s retina: a constellation of interrelated spherical shapes, like an illustration from an advanced microbiology textbook. Nguyen moused over ‘the PLO’, the Pizza Liberation Organization. The bankers clapped and laughed, rolling the trunks of their bodies from side to side. It was already part of American college lore.

  Even Wisnold flashed a grin at the ClamorBuy™ group buying service – ‘The Power of Many’, as the strap line went. The logo was a gavel hanging over the graphical representation of some smokestack industry.

  According to online news reports, Wiz had tested ClamorBuy™ on a local high-volume pizza delivery company called Leaning Tower of Pizzas. Owner Tony Romano had told Wiz that if he ordered more than a thousand pizzas, the $10 price for a 12 inch thin crust would fall by a dollar for each additional 500 pizzas ordered. The highest single order Romano had previously received, over four decades of trading, was for 950 pizzas – for a Hewlett Packard company-wide meeting. The final order from Clamor.us came in at 8,422 pizzas and, according to the stepped fee schedule agreed, Romano was required to provide them for just 33 cents each. The contract was enforced. Romano’s 41 year-old family pizza business filed for bankruptcy. It was the first recorded case of a business being ‘clamorized’, as the phenomenon became known. So went the tale of The Pizza Liberation Organization. Dwayne Wisnold’s social life was transformed. The awkward straw-haired kid from Nebraska was voted Coolest Guy Around Campus, on – where else? – Clamor.us.

  The joke suitably milked, Nguyen settled into a more serious posture:

  “When I came aboard Clamor as Chief Scientist, two things got me super excited. One was very large data sets. The other was big problems.”

  The image on the screen now showed planets in orbit. It was dumbed down for the investor crowd, Natalie knew, but Nguyen was working it well. Few people really understood the technology and what it was capable of, even among a crowd such as this.

  “Sixty million affinity groups,” Nguyen forged ahead. “And a single big problem to solve: the digitization of identity. So that the web will finally –” he sighed “– know you. Not just what you tell it about yourself, the way it used to work back in web one-dot-o. Rather, it will know the essence of you, more than you do yourself.

  “One of the great web pioneers, Jeffrey Bezos, was once asked what the future held for e-commerce personalization. Perhaps he was asked the question at an event just like this one.” The audience was on the edge of its seats. What had Jeff Bezos said? How would Tom Nguyen see him, raise him?

  “Bezos replied that, one day, you would go on to Amazon.com, and there, in one square foot of pixilated selling space, would be a single product. Not just the product you always wanted, but the product you didn’t even consciously know you always wanted!

  “Well, we’re applying the visionary thinking now. Not to products, but to people. To dating and mating. To workplace relationships and perfect careers. To all of the ingredients for happiness, fulfillment and social wellbeing. He
re. Now.”

  A river of applause ran through the room. Nguyen let it wash itself out.

  It reminded Natalie of just what she’d been missing the last 18 months: working alongside super-smart guys such as Tom Nguyen at the big company in Seattle, where she’d ascended to the role of head of security while still in her late twenties. Teaching yoga in the Bahamas meantime had certainly had its rewards. But there were things about this world that she’d sorely missed, she now realized. Even the darting glances of the moneymen sat around her. She’d been more than happy to accept Tom’s invitation to the event, coinciding as it did with a trip to Seattle to see friends and former work colleagues. She was enjoying being there in a green wool wrap dress and strappy cork wedge shoes – being among these people, yet not exactly one of them.

  “Why am I back-dropped by this representation of planets in orbit?” Nguyen’s hand ascended leisurely towards the massive screen again. “Is it another of Wiz’s college group conquests?” Laughter again. Wisnold was impassive. “In fact no. The North American Space Agency spent decades collecting the necessary data to conform these planets to their correct, orbital paths. Thankfully, we got to the point of inferring a Clamor user’s true affinity constellation and implied life path rather more quickly.” He lightened the mood once more. “Jon is a patient venture capitalist, but only so patient.”

  Jon Vogel of the New Earth Fund sat quietly alongside Wisnold. He modified his permanently surprised expression into a grin:

  “If I may add a word or two.”

  Nguyen looked to Ben Silverman, the investment banker handling the road show. Apparently this was not part of the script. Silverman spread his palms: Just roll with it.

  “Sure,” Tom Nguyen said. “The floor is yours, Jon.’

  The ruddy-faced, sixty-two year-old swallowed a salt pill, gulped down some bottled water and stood up. A black T-shirted stage-hand clipped a mike to his patched corduroy jacket. This was definitely unscripted. Then again, according to those online articles, Jon Vogel’s whole life was unscripted.

  Vogel was the original Berkeley radical. He’d lived the Summer of Love as a mainstay of at the Esalen Institute down by Big Sur. He’d left the ‘60s unusually lost. Reportedly, he could not explain to old friends what happened to him between mid ’73 and late ’74. He drifted, watching the world go by. In particular, he watched the growth of Silicon Valley in the late ‘70s and, according to those articles, there it dawned on him – that technology might just be the way to champion social reform and activist causes in new and far reaching ways.

  So began the life of New Earth Llc. For two decades, it dabbled unsuccessfully, then struck gold with Google. More accurately, Vogel invested in a friend’s fund that only invested in Google, and several hundred million dollars rained down on New Earth. To Vogel it was a sign, a vital sign, heralding a new age.

  The Clamor investment was both more and less accidental. One of the first groups set up on Clamor.us was the ‘Four More Wars’ movement organized at Stanford University against President George W. Bush’s re-election. Within 48 hours, almost 4,000 members had joined, many of the signatories coming from off-campus – Jon Vogel being one. By the end of that week, Vogel had bought 40% of Clamor.us Inc. for just $2 million. “It was a no-brainer,” he was quoted as saying. “Literally, my brain was not involved,” he’d apparently added, thumping his heart. “Dissent was just in the company’s DNA.”

  There was a loud crackle as Vogel adjusted the mike, then a short blast of feedback. Audience members reached for their ears and narrowed their eyes. Finally he began:

  “In 1984 a little-known sci-fi writer named William Gibson published a novel called Neuromancer in which people came equipped with computer jacks in their skulls and could become part of a massive worldwide brain.

  “Is anyone here old enough to remember Arpanet?”

  Quizzical looks came back from the crowd.

  “Well Arpanet became the Internet, and the global human brain became you. Us. Your picture became mine. My information and thoughts became yours.”

  Nguyen was looking again to Ben Silverman, who was watching the crowd. For the time being, they remained respectful. This was after all Jon Vogel, whose annual Woodstock-by-the-sea technology conference, down at his Monterey Peninsular home, remained a huge draw in the Valley. But how far would they let him go with his ‘dot-communist propaganda’ and ‘socialist networking’, before cutting him off?

  “Instead of gathering in factories, we gather in collective digital work spaces. Instead of conventional means of production, we have desktop virtual co-ops. Instead of taxes and subsidies, abundance. A bounty of free goods.”

  Now it was Vogel’s turn to pause for effect:

  “The Wealth of Networks. Sharing! The foundation for the highest levels of social interaction.”

  Natalie leaned forward, chin in palms, elbows on knees. Frankly, he sounded a lot like her father. Stripped of the techno-babble, it seemed like one of the late Henri Chevalier’s legendary columns for France’s Le Monde newspaper:

  “So far, the largest efforts have been open-source ones. How large? Oh, significantly so. Perhaps six hundred thousand man-years of work went into last year’s release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly can govern a project on the scale of a decentralized town or village.” Vogel gazed out at the crowd in wonderment, like a child lost in an enchanted kingdom. “I’d like to tell you a story, a true story. Once upon a time there was a boy named Craig who started a list, and he called it Craigslist…”

  But the crowd was tuning out now, Natalie could tell. What had any of this to do with Clamor.us? They’d turned out on a Friday afternoon, yes, for some sci-fi magic, but mostly for the promise of untold monetary wealth – that alchemic transformation peculiar to this part of Northern California. Certainly not for plain old new ageism.

  Vogel soldiered on into his Craiglist story anyway. It was in some sense a mirror to Clamor.us, possibly wider humanity too. The explosive growth. The social good of a free classified advertising service balanced by the menace of its un-policed backwaters and its notorious adult listings. The company was in legal dispute with minority investor eBay. This modern day fairy tale was not sitting well with the others on stage, Natalie could tell from their body language. Thankfully, Jon was nearing his finale: “The social web,” he exclaimed, looking around, almost blinded by the light: “Ask not what your web can do for you! Ask what you can do for your web!” and he punched the air!

  Then he sat down, almost missing his chair.

  “Well thanks Jon, for that. Um … does anybody have any questions?” Silverman turned to the crowd. A hand went up. “Yess!” he said with evident relief.

  “Hi, Josh Hartman here from American Millennium,” a clean-cut young man said. “I’d like to ask about the financials if I may. I understand you’re looking to raise two point five billion at a post-money valuation of fifteen. That’s twenty five times current year revenues. I just wondered if you had any comments on revenue or profitability growth or both.” He handed the hand-held mike back.

  “Hiiii,” a treacly voice came from behind. “I have a follow-on question,” the raven-haired lady said with her hand held high, a black T-shirt putting a mike into it. “Thank you. Brie DuBois of the Trumpington Bugle blog. Say, I heard that more than half the current five hundred million revenue line comes from a single search advertising deal that is set to expire. Perhaps you could say something about the risk of revenue erosion.”

  “Good questions, good questions,” said Silverman, looking around rather helplessly. “Dwayne, would you like to talk about the product vision and how revenue opportunities fit into it?”

  Apparently Dwayne Wisnold’s parents hadn’t even met when Arpanet was written about. ‘Wiz’ himself barely had living memory of a world without the web. He’d just entered grade school when the Netscape web browser rolled out in ’95. Prior to starting Clamor, his only entrepreneurial experience had been a
joke, albeit a popular one.

  If the online news reports were to be believed, in 1999 – at the crazed height of the Web 1.0 boom – he’d scored $1 million in funding from a Nebraskan VC called Luna Ventures, for a high school science project. He’d worked out a way to print digital photos onto bed sheets, then sell them back online at a site called virtual-bedding.com. The most popular image was of a bikini-clad Princess Leia from the opening scenes of Return of the Jedi. It allowed fellow students to claim they were sleeping with actress Carrie Fisher. Virtual-bedding was rumored to be in acquisition talks with a lifestyle products e-store, before both died in the 2000 bust. Thereafter, Wisnold went back to his science homework. His next venture would be a dorm room social experiment in his Stanford freshman year, which he jokingly called Clamor – owing to his housemates’ interest in the beta site, and specifically a feature called ‘HotorWhat?’ ranking female freshmen year book photos out of 10.

  A black T-shirt struggled with Wisnold’s fleece, trying to find a place to clip on the miniature mike. Wiz kept his palms against his jeans. He stared down at his feet like he was looking at them for the first time.

  “So, er – wow. Hi!”

  There was a sympathetic stir in the crowd. He seemed so slight, so young!

  “So, revenues. Yeah, we’ve been thinking about that. But before we talk numbers, let’s talk concepts. Like, consider Google.” The crowd and Silverman appeared to breath easier.

  “Think about: expressed interest meets relevant products and services.” Wiz brought the index fingers of both hands together at face height. “Weird,” he said. “It’s like I’m doing some sorta mono stage show thing of ET...

  “Anyways, that’s just what happens, when you enter a search keyword on Google, and the computer serves you up a Sponsored Link. It’s win, win, win. A win for the user, a win for the advertiser, and a win for … erm …

  “Google,” said Silverman.